The Danville News

Robert John Andrews

Thursday, 6 November, 2025

“Tomorrow”

Word Count:  750

 

Tomorrow can be rather easy to predict, despite those surprises beyond our control.  Example?  I had planned to enjoy the third game of the World Series until our cable service went down.  Surprises aside, you too can predict the future. 

 

A Biblical flaw pictures Bible prophets as if they’re psychics, mistaking prophets for Crystal Ball soothsayers.  Prophets do predict the future, only because they have a keen grasp of the present.  Prophets hold up the people, the country, their religion, and contrast them against the revealed will of God.  They’re truth-tellers.  Which explains why the prophets were universally disliked.  They demanded their people renounce ungodly means.  Whoever likes a conscience?  Get off my shoulder, Jiminy Cricket!

 

Take Amos for example.  The people really disliked hearing his disturbing accusations.  Why?  Israel was at the height of its financial and military power and assumed itself spiritually superior, thus deserving of its rewards.  But Israel’s wealth was mined by strip mining the poor and the vulnerable.  Its religion was pretense and pride, thus pathetic.  The few idle rich enjoyed their pleasures because most others suffered.  Such a nation forfeits its moral and spiritual legitimacy.  Beneath their privilege lay the rot of violence and cancers of corruption.  Seeding poison ivy versus planting roses.  I still cannot fathom why we bother referring to Israel as the holy land when throughout its history it was incredibly unholy.  Read the Bible.  I’ve long contended how Jerusalem is no holier than Chicago, Tegucigalpa, or Newark. 

 

Amos is a prophet for our times too.  His audience similarly ignored how the gift of power requires moral obligations.  Those to whom much is given, of them much is expected.  If a drunk drinks from Waterford Crystal, is he or she any less a drunk?

 

If you lie, cheat, defraud, break the law, abuse others, worship idols, practice injustice, any sensible person can prophecy your future (including, tragically, the future of those damaged by your terroristic and disgraceful choices).  I’m still trying to figure out how folks whose opinions I once respected can excuse this malevolent guy.  Vehicles of God’s providence aren’t always blessings;  They often arrive as divine curses, exposing us for what we are. 

 

With bare feet, we tred on shards of broken glass.  On November 9 we remember Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass.  1938:  when Hitler’s goons destroyed over 7,500 Jewish shops and over 1,000 synagogues on a murderous, anti-Semitic, state sanctioned rampage.  How handy to rely on lawless gangs.  No body cameras either.  Real soldiers refuse unlawful orders!

 

We press the issue the way you press a wound to staunch the bleeding.  The bitterest truth is that there can be a why we suffer:  we cause most of our own suffering.   There is a reason for our troubles.  Very often it stems from our choices or the choices of others.  I can work on my own harmful choices, but the choices of others affecting me are most infuriating.  We are subject to a wanton world of probabilities.  If someone is killed in a car accident, does it qualify as an accident?  Is it an accident if someone ran the red light or fell asleep or was using their cell phone?   

 

Disease can be trickier, because the cause is oft elusive.  Sometimes sickness is attributable to bad habits or nasty environmentals or your genetic make-up instructing one small cell in your body to step back and stop fighting the cancer.  Sometimes we are victims of nature’s caprice, from eclampsia to leopards, hurricanes to leeches. 

 

Which explains why God never needs to punish -- we do quite a splendid enough job of that ourselves.  The old Scottish adage holds true:  sin punishes sin.  Tomorrow will come, ready or not.  What we do today determines tomorrow. 

 

A prophet of my era, Martin Luther King Jr, summarized this by teaching how the ends are preexistent in the means:  “In the final analysis, means and ends must cohere because the end is preexistent in the means, and, ultimately, destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends.”

 

Which is why I remain encouraged, for I have seen the future.  I saw our future on a school playground in Alameda, California.  I accompanied our daughter escorting her daughter to school.  What a panoply of gifts!  What joy!  So many children from so many ethnic backgrounds, each instinctively making each other friends.  They define the future, not your hatred or needy cruelty. 

 

You can try to pull us down, but our granddaughter is stronger than